The Great High Priest

**For the privacy of people involved in the organization that we volunteer for, real names have not been given and the organization's name has been ommited**

Yesterday was a tough day.

First of all, the girl I prayed with last week in terms of her substance abuse wasn't in attendance even after a lot of prayer during the week, I was discouraged already.

We (Matt and I) volunteer at a place in Detroit that provides hope to homeless, runaway and at-risk youth, ages 13-22. This place provides shelter, educational and vocational programs as well as other support services. What we do fall into the "other support services" - they call us chaplains and we spend a couple of hours with these teens sharing the truth of the Gospel of Jesus.

For the last few weeks we haven't had specific topics to talk about but have allowed the residents to share what they are struggling with in hopes that when we share the Gospel, their hearts would be softened and they will truly repent and receive.

The girls shared stories upon stories of abuse: physically and emotionally. Abuse from parents, adoptive parents, foster parents, aunts, uncles, strangers, boyfriends, friends....my heart sank. These girls said they grew up in the church and they were taught the truths of the Bible and yet they were abused.

"Well this is just who I am, I like women and men, and God knows that, I can't hide it from him so I'm not going to pretend that I'm not bisexual....He already knows."

"My auntie called me names and was ashamed of me because I'm gay. She said I was dirty because the bible said so."

"I have no one. I would never lay my life down for anyone else cause I have to protect me."

"My girlfriend was the one who changed my life, how can someone say a girl can't be with another girl when this girl was all I had."

The bottled up feelings and pain that these girls shared yesterday tore me apart. I was angry and I was sad. How could people who shared the truth of the Bible with them completely forget about the grace of Jesus?

After years of abuse for these girls, I can't possibly just say, believe in Jesus and everything will be better without first entering in their pain. In a sense it is true, believing in Jesus will make everything better but our expectation of "better" is wildly different than that of God. God said in John 15:18 that if the world hates you, it hated Him first so with that, we have to expect that our radical living for Christ will make the world hate us. However, He also said in John 16:33 that in Him we will have peace even if the world gives us tribulation because He has overcome the world. Everything will be better because God promises not to forsake us. Yes it will be difficult to flee from the sin we are in bondage from but it will be worth the fight. Yes it will be difficult to obey God's design of being male and female when our flesh wants to be the gender it shouldn't be but it will be worth the fight to honor the one who gave His life for our eternity.

After a lot of tears, there was breakthrough, the Holy Spirit overwhelemed the girls to understand that He is powerful and He is their creator and He can change even their deepest darkest sin. He reminded us that fighting sin is hard and is a process but we have to believe Him for that change, we have to choose Him instead of what we want because what we want is usually not what we truly need. They wanted to tap out but they didn't and because of His great love, they stayed at the table. I'm not going to say that all of them got saved that night and they all promised to turn from their sin right away but what encouraged my heart was that they were all willing to stay and fight.

God drove Hebrews 4:14-16 really deep in my heart a while ago when I was struggling with whether God understood my pain or not and I shared that with the girls. It was a reminder that we will never go through any sort of suffering that God Himself has not faced. He is our Great high Priest.

Yes, it was a rough day yesterday but God still reigns and He helped me battle my unbelief yet again. My heart is still broken for these girls so my reponse is to pray - that is the best thing I can do for them. Pray and believe.

Bonus: the girl that wasn't there last night, showed up on our way to the car and I got to hand her a book to read for the week, may God use it to keep softening her hear towards His truth.